How to Improve Your Alexa Ranking

If you’re a website owner, ad sales rep, advertiser or SEO then it behooves you to understand what Alexa is and to take steps to improve your site’s Alexa ranking.  Here’s a quick guide to understanding Alexa and some tips on how to improve your ranking.

Update Feb 17, ‘09:

To lend a little credibility to our modest authority in the subject, here’s a look at how The Daily Anchor’s Alexa rank has improved since we first launched the site:
December 5th 2008: 20,965,582
December 6th: 9,343,420
December 9th: 5,297,978
December 12th: 1,943,049
December 16th: 1,497,803
December 20th: 1,400,584
January 9th: 884,291
February 10th: 186,962
February 14th: 174,611
February 17th: 162,600
February 20thL 153,905

That’s an improvement of about 20,500,000 in 60 days. In the past 20 days weeks we’ve hit a daily Alexa rank below 100,000 fourteen times, including dips as low as 34,311. Our weekly average right now is 91,984, and hasn’t been aboe 107,000 in 2 weeks.

First things first, What is Alexa?

Alexa – an Amazon.com company – ranks websites based on the level of traffic they receive from visitors with the Alexa toolbar installed; the lower a website’s Alexa ranking, the greater their traffic. Alexa rankings are most useful to webmasters and advertisers who use Alexa rankings to determine the worth of a link from (or banner ad on) a given website (e.g. The Wall Street Journal can claim to be ranked #386 out of 300,000,000 websites, which is a pretty huge value statement.) While webmasters have access to web analytics tools that show them incredibly detailed visitor information on their website, there is no way for you or me to gauge the traffic to their website without using a service like Alexa.

If you intend to monetize your website by selling advertising then you’ll definitely want to increase your Alexa rank, because it’ll increase your bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing. Even though Alexa rankings are not a completely accurate depiction of traffic (more on that in a minute), prospective advertisers will most certainly look at your Alexa ranking to assign a value to your site.

To be clear, while Alexa is an incredibly useful tool for tracking traffic trends and giving you an initial impression of a site’s visitors it is grossly inaccurate for actual ranking (outside the top 30,000 sites) and visitors and can be manipulated, particularly within the 80,000-200,000 range.

At this point it’d be useful to see some actual rankings, so you can see a list of today’s Top 100 sites right here. Yahoo is #1, Google is #2, YouTube is #3…  The websites at the top of the list (with the lowest ranking) rarely change in rank, and when they do it is normally by only a few ranks. The ranking of other tiers change frequently, though, by a range of a few thousand ranks within the 1,000-100,000 range, by tens of thousands in the 100,000-300,000 range, and by unpredictable surges and slides above 300,000.

It’s important to note that Alexa traffic rank is is based on 3 months of aggregated data and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach.) Alexa “computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)” (Alexa)

Case Study: TheDailyAnchor.com. When I first wrote this post on Jan 27th ‘09 our Alexa ranking was 884,291; not much to brag about. In the last 3 weeks, though, our Alexa rank experienced a massive jump to around 185,000 2 weeks ago, and has been improving by about 10,000 every 4 days. Keep in mind that Alexa rankings are based on 3 months of aggregated data, and TheDailyAnchor.com just launched in December ‘08. That means that 12 weeks ago the site wasn’t even ranked and 8 weeks ago the ranking was around 20,000,000. A reasonably good indicator of our current rank, then, is to consider just our 1-week average ranking, which yesterday was around 94,000.  While a low weekly average is great, in general the 3-month average is what really matters. Why? What if your Alexa ranking for a given week was 80,000, but every other week your ranking was around 1,000,000? If I’m an advertiser considering buying ad space on your site, then I don’t care about your traffic spikes, I care about your sustained traffic levels. Assuming your Alexa rank is accurately reflecting your true traffic, I might buy ad space from you at a rate of $5/month if your rank is 1,000,000, or $1,750/month if your Alexa rank is around 70,000. The difference is huge.

Here are the traffic details for TheDailyAnchor:

Here are the traffic details for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com):

What is the Alexa Toolbar?

If you have the Alexa Toolbar installed, then as you surf the web the toolbar shows you the traffic ranking for each site you visit, AND sends anonymous information about your visit back to Alexa.com.  The information sent to Alexa includes the URL of the site you visited, the number of pages you visited on that site, and your IP address (used to differentiate unique visits). This is the information used to calculate the rankings.

The Alexa Toolbar:

In theory, the Alexa Toolbar provides a representative sample of internet users as a whole, much like Nielsen TV ratings, for which a relatively small sample of TV viewers are used to calculate how many people watch a given show. In practice, however, the Alexa Toolbar is used by too few people – and too many SEO specialists  – making the rankings outside of the top 100,000 notoriously inaccurate and giving SEO and tech-related websites an unfair advantage (e.g. if the largest group of Alexa Toolbar users are SEO/tech specialists and those people are more likely to visit SEO/tech websites, then those sites receive a disproportionate number of Alexa Toolbar-using visitors than they do the average web surfer.)

The Alexa Toolbar is available only for Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox:

Internet Explorer version: The Alexa Toolbar for IE shows information about the Alexa ranking of the site you’re visiting, links to relevant websites, and includes a pop-up blocker, a search engine entry box powered by Google, a link to Amazon.com, and a link to Alexa for further site information.

Firefox version: The Alexa Toolbar for Firefox – named Sparky (who knows why) – shows information about the Alexa ranking of the site you’re visiting, and contains links to relevant websites and to Alexa.com for further traffic details. It does not include a pop-up blocker, a search engine entry box, or a link to Amazon.com.

Alexa’s Primary Flaws:

• The number of Alexa Toolbar users is relatively small compared to the number of internet users, so there may be millions of Web sites that, even if they have a lot of traffíc, will not be ranked (or not high enough) by Alexa. (remember: if not a single Alexa Toolbar user visits your site, you won’t rank at all; even in the top 20,000,000)
• Many people say that Alexa rankings can be greatly influenced (or “gamed.”)
• Subdomains are not ranked separately, and neither are subpages within a domain. The overall traffic is calculated for the top-level domain only.
• Because the Alexa Toolbar aggregates user data and sends it to a 3rd party (Alexa), the Toolbar registers as SpyWare on many PCs.

How Do I Improve My Alexa Ranking?

Top 10 Tips to do just that…

1. Content is King. As with all SEO/SEM/traffic-related strategies, your long term goal should focus on developing quality traffic which attracts and maintains a large audience and not artificially increasing your Alexa Rank.  Great content = more visitors = better Alexa rank.
2. Install the Alexa Toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and then then surf your own site (note that Alexa will count a user’s visit only 1x per day). Now you can guarantee at least one of your visitors have the Toolbar installed.
3. If you work in an office or have multiple computers in your home, install the Toolbar on every computer and set each browser’s homepage to your domain. Note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.
4. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar… co-workers, friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers.
5. Try to get your articles on such social bookmarking sites as digg.com, del.icio.us, or stumbleupon, as this can drive high numbers of visitors to your site and the resulting traffic will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank.
6. Place an Alexa widget on your Web site.  Note: I only recommend displaying your Alexa Rank once it falls below 200,000.
7. Write high-quality content that appeals to webmasters… e.g. articles on SEO, generating traffic or domaining. Promote this content on webmaster forums and on social networking sites. The idea is to get as many Alexa Toolbar users as possible (read: geeks, webmasters, search engine optimizers & marketers)  to visit your site, since there’s a greater probability that they will have the Alexa toolbar installed.
8. If you’re planning a media buy, considering buying ad space on webmaster forums and websites. Paid advertising can drive great traffic period, but webmasters are more likely to have the Alexa Toolbar installed.
9. Optimize your site (or relevant pages of it) for Alexa related keywords.
10. I’ve read in several forums that that Alexa Rankings are widely used in East Asia and that it can be helpful to seed links into Asian social networking forums.

Things you Should NOT do to Improve your Alexa Ranking.

The following tactics are tantamount to blackhat SEO and can get your site DE-LISTED from Alexa entirely:

• Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, good. If you look it up out of curiosity, cool, but know that many sites have been stripped of their Alexa ranking for trying this… a 200,000 ranking is better than none at all)
• Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. Do people really do this?
• Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums. Come on? Really?

Download Links:

- Alexa Toolbar for Firefox (“Sparky”)
- SearchStatus for Firefox
- Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer (note: not compatible with Vista)

Further Reading: Matt Cutts on Alexa

If you have any questions, leave a comment or shoot me an email.

Tagged as: Advertising, Advertising tips, Alexa, Analytics, Marketing, Marketing tips, Online Advertising, SEO, Web Design